Field
Aspects of the present invention generally relate to an image forming apparatus, an information processing method, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
With the enhanced awareness of security and cost reduction in recent years, in certain print systems, an image forming apparatus stores print data and performs actual printing through user authentication (reservation printing). In such a system, there arises a time delay between a user instructing the image forming apparatus to perform printing from a host personal computer (PC) until the image forming apparatus actually performs user authentication and starts printing. Suppose, for example, there is a case where the number of members for a meeting increases or decreases during such a time delay. As a result, there arises a demand for increasing or decreasing the number of copies to be printed for print data with which the user has already instructed the image forming apparatus to perform printing. To meet this demand, some print systems allow a user to change the number of copies to be printed for print data stored in an image forming apparatus. The user is able to specify the number of copies when performing printing by using a printer driver from an application on a host PC. Specific applications and printer drivers process print data so that the number of copies to be printed becomes the number of copies specified by the user, and transmit the processed print data to the image forming apparatus. Since the print data has already been processed, the image forming apparatus does not need to perform printing taking the specified number of copies into consideration. However, for example, in a case where print data includes six pages processed by the printer driver, the image forming apparatus does not know whether the print data is intended to be printed as a single six-page document or as a two copy three-page document. For print data processed on the host PC side, the image forming apparatus does not know the number of pages for one copy as described above, and hence the number of copies cannot be correctly changed on the image forming apparatus side.
To address this, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2013-107257 discusses a technique of previously adding the number of pages for one copy as an attribute value in print data on a host PC side to enable correct changing of the number of copies when the number of copies is changed on an image forming apparatus side.
When an application processes print data according to the number of copies, the number of pages for one copy may not be previously added as an attribute value in the print data. In other words, there is print data with which the number of copies cannot be correctly changed by a conventional technique. As a result, a user cannot subsequently modify print data for reservation printing as desired.